Category: Politics

Climate Progress Report

sum15_beatheat-17413According to Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University, “The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle. They are playing out before us, in real time. The 2015 numbers drive that home.”

The Planet Earth set several records in 2015:

  • The Earth experienced its hottest year on record
  • Greenhouse gas concentration was the highest on record
  • Ocean surface temperatures were the highest on record
  • Global sea level rose to a new record high
  • More floods and droughts ravaged the planet
  • Arctic sea ice continued to disappear

Not to worry though. The Earth doesn’t care. It was OK before humans arrived and will recover and be just fine after we’re gone.

roz-chast-the-concrete-cafe-egg-bacon-hash-browns-fried-on-sidewalk-new-yorker-cartoon

Click here for full report.

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Urban Relocation in L.A.

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Dodger Stadium – 1960

Dodger Stadium opened in 1962. Even today, more than fifty years later, there are still people who will not set foot inside the ballpark at Chavez Ravine – and not because they are Giants fans.

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Race and Self-Deception

Nicholas Kristof grew up on a farm in Yamhill, Oregon. He works for the New York Times, traveling the world, reporting from wherever there is human suffering. In 2005, when pundit Bill O’Reilly was promoting his annual “War on Christmas,” Kristof offered to show him what war really looked like.

“If you want to do something journalistic, come along with me on my next trip to Darfur. You’ll have to leave your studio and deal with people who, if they don’t like you, will shoot you in a moment. But you’ll also have the chance to take a genuinely important and overlooked story and bring it into people’s homes. So come on, Bill. What’ll it be? More ranting from your studio? Or real journalism?”

Mr. O’Reilly did not take him up on the offer.

Mr. Kristof recently published a piece on a timely subject: race and white delusion.

“My hunch is that we will likewise look back and conclude that today’s calls for racial justice, if anything, understate the problem — and that white America, however well meaning, is astonishingly oblivious to pervasive inequity.”

Read it here.

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Deja Vu All Over Again

Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta

In the 1974 movie Chinatown, an aggrieved wife hires private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) to get the goods on her adulterous husband. Jake finds himself caught up in murder, incest and a scheme by corrupt Los Angeles officials to steal water for their municipal supply. (Jake also gets to partake in some adultery himself, with Faye Dunaway. But that’s getting off-topic.)

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